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A good portion of government and defense related IT jobs cannot be moved offshore. Some of that work is done by offshore subcontractors, but certainly not all of it. And there is a limit to how much can be sent offshore due to political, legal, security, or privacy issues. With added r

Hang on a minute. I thought the gist of your post was that offshorable IT == lower-skill IT.

Not quite. I started out by saying, «the high-wage "developed world" does not have a monopoly on brilliant people...». Martin Fowler recently wrote [martinfowler.com] about ThoughtWorks, and their experiences with development centers in Bangalore and Melbourne. For example, he concludes (in part):

As I write this, offshore development is very fashionable, but it's still too early to really understand its true stre

So I asked for examples of IT jobs that were so high skill they could not be exported.

Actually, I was arguing the inverse -- it's not that high-skill jobs will not be sent offshore, but rather the jobs that will be sent offshore in pursuit of lower labor costs are low skill IT jobs.

For example, accounting systems are a very well-understood domain for IT. Yet each large company's accounting system has unique wrinkles. At the very large end of the spectrum, it's not a problem amenable to a generalize

I think I see what you were saying now. So the limits to outsourcing have to do with the separability of IT from domain knowledge. Since the domain knowledge resides in the USA, the more interesting jobs will reside in the USA.

That may be true for the short term, but I'm not sure about the long term.

one day soon if not already, important customers/markets will not be American.

even for American customers, domain knowledge isn't all that tied to the USA. American companies consult around the world too.

So the limits to outsourcing have to do with the separability of IT from domain knowledge. Since the domain knowledge resides in the USA, the more interesting jobs will reside in the USA.

That's a good chunk of it. Some work will remain here (or in Canada, or Switzerland, or...) because there's a critical mass of learning and people available to crack a problem. There's no reason why India or China can't become the leading center of computational astrophysics, but NASA Goddard will probably remain on

: 1. What is the possibility of this being added in the future?
In the near future, the probability is close to zero. In the distant
future, I'll be dead, and posterity can do whatever they like... :-) --lwall

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